Pentagon Seeks Command For Emergencies in the U.S.

The Pentagon has decided to ask President Clinton for the power to appoint a military leader for the continental United States because of what it sees as a growing threat of major terrorist strikes on American soil, Defense Department officials say.

The plan calls for the military leader to be ready, if necessary, to do such things as order thousands of doctors, stretchers and emergency personnel quickly sent to stricken areas, much as American commanders abroad are now prepared to do.

The Pentagon, which currently has no organization for such crisis work, has quietly discussed the plan for about a year and recently decided to press ahead and ask for Presidential approval.

Top White House officials have reacted favorably, characterizing the proposed step as a relatively minor adjustment of the lines of military authority and organization.

But civil libertarians and some Administration officials fear that such military power could slowly expand to threaten the privacy, liberty and lives of private citizens. Defenders of the plan, including Pentagon officials, insist that it would do no such thing and that the nation needed homeland defense to deal with terrorists armed with deadly germs, chemicals and skills for attacking the nation's key computer networks.

Military officials added that they had no intention of usurping civilian control.

''Our only appropriate role is in support of civil agencies that have the primary responsibility for law and order and emergency response,'' John J. Hamre, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said in an interview.

Still, a senior Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, warned that a major terrorist attack had the potential to be ''the most threatening event to civil liberties since Pearl Harbor.''

His reference was to how, after Japan's attack on the United States in World War II, the American military locked up some 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, an act some historians have characterized as reckless. The official said the current plan would help prevent such an overreaction.

The official said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen had recently signed off on a plan to create a Joint Task Force for Civil Support, whose commander would develop ways for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to aid Federal agencies in time of domestic crisis.

The step requires approval by the President. In an interview on Jan. 21 with The New York Times, Mr. Clinton said he was carefully weighing the issue and was deeply aware of the potential abuses of expanded military power. And the next day, in unveiling his $10 billion program to build up antiterror defenses, he emphasized the importance of protecting personal freedom.

''It is essential,'' Mr. Clinton told Federal officials and military officers gathered at the National Academy of Sciences, ''that we don't undermine liberty in the name of liberty.''

Many Americans have a deep mistrust of the military. That uneasiness is evident in ''The Siege,'' a recent movie in which terrorist attacks prompt martial law in New York City and the Army general in charge turns out to be a loose cannon.

Allusions to the Pentagon's new organizational plan emerged quietly last year when Dr. Hamre of the Defense Department gave a speech saying the appointment of a domestic military leader was all but inevitable and would be essential in helping stave off chaos.

''If there's a bona fide chemical attack in the subway system in New York, it's going to quickly go beyond what the local police can handle,'' Dr. Hamre told military officials. ''If there is a biological attack, you can easily see regional governors calling out the National Guard to quarantine the highways. It could get crazy very fast.''

Critics of the plan say the risks of military help outweigh the benefits.

''The danger is in the inevitable expansion of that authority so the military gets involved in things like arresting people and investigating crimes,'' said Gregory T. Nojeim, legislative counsel on national security for the American Civil Liberties Union, based in Washington.

Soldiers are trained to kill, not to respect the nuances of law enforcement, Mr. Nojeim added.

''It's hard to believe that a soldier with a suspect in the sights of his M-1 tank is well positioned to protect that person's civil liberties,'' he said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Nojeim said, already has the money, authority and manpower to handle such crises.

But Fred C. Ikle, an Under Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, applauded finding ways for the military to deal better with terrorism on American soil.

''Only the armed services have the managerial and logistical capabilities to mount the all-out defensive effort,'' Dr. Ikle said in a report on homeland defense being prepared for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a private policy group in Washington.

By law, the military cannot make arrests or act in civil law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed after the Civil War to rein in the military, bars Federal troops from doing police work within United States borders.

The division of powers that bars the military from domestic law enforcement is similar to that between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. The former does surveillance work at home and the latter abroad.

Though venerable, the dominance of civil power under posse comitatus (Latin for ''power of the country'') has seen a growing number of exceptions. One, widely viewed as having mixed results, concerns drug interdiction. Mr. Nojeim of the A.C.L.U. said that in 1997 that exception resulted in death when troops in Texas accidentally shot a teen-age to death.

Former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who specializes in national security issues, said another exception became law in the Reagan Administration when Congress permitted posse comitatus to be waived in the event of nuclear terrorism.

Congress later widened the exception, Mr. Nunn added. After the Soviet Union fell apart and Western experts grew worried about the possible spread of powerful weapons into unfriendly hands, he helped sponsor a little-noticed provision that gives the Pentagon power to step in domestically in the event of chemical and germ attacks.

''They already have the authority,'' Mr. Nunn said of the armed services in an interview.

The new question, he said, is whether the services will become properly organized and trained and their actions well coordinated in advance of any mayhem.

A senior Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition on anonymity, cast examples of the domestic work in strictly humanitarian terms. Only the military services, the official said, have the ability to transport 3,000 hospital cots, tons of clean water or ''10,000 people who have been inoculated against anthrax'' to the site of a biological attack where civilians are sick, dead or dying.

''The issue is how we organize ourselves to provide meaningful support and not to threaten civil liberties,'' the official said.

In the aid work, he added, the Pentagon would report to the Department of Justice, which has the lead not only in law enforcement but in coordinating the domestic response to terrorism.

The official said the joint task force recently endorsed by Mr. Cohen would, if approved by the President, have a high-level commander.

He and other Pentagon officials said the new post would probably go to the United States Atlantic Command, which is based in Norfolk, Va.

Formal presentation of the plan to the White House might not occur for months, and a Presidential decision might not be made public until late summer, Pentagon officials said.

In his recent interview with The Times, Mr. Clinton said he was keeping an open mind on the subject and called the issue of the military's role ''the last big kind of organizational piece'' in strengthening the nation's defenses against new kinds of terrorism.

''What I want us to do,'' he said, ''is everything within reason we can to minimize our exposure and risks here, and that's how I'm going to evaluate this Pentagon recommendation.''